Pleased to meet me? Taxpayers in new House and Senate districts shouldn't foot the bill for pols' election year mailers: Editorial

Lawmakers trying to introduce themselves to new constituents, under the transparent guise of electioneering, should be expected to foot the bill.

As the last couple of months have shown us, there’s a lot about Pennsylvania politics that doesn’t pass the laugh test.

But as “Only in Pennsylvania” moments go, this one is right up there:

Thanks to the wonders of once-a-decade legislative reapportionment, millions of Pennsylvanians will cast their ballots in reconfigured legislative districts in the May 20 primary and in this November’s general election.

Because of that, the Pennsylvania Ethics Commission has cleared incumbents in the state House to send out taxpayer-funded mailings so they can introduce themselves to their new constituents.

And, hey, if they end up voting for them as a consequence, then all the better, right?

So you can hardly blame Army veteran and Republican state House hopeful Josh Lang for grousing to The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that a four-page glossy mailer sent out by his primary opponent, Rep. Jesse Topper, R-Bedford, is little more than a publicly funded piece of re-election literature.

“It’s totally unfair,” he told The Tribune-Review. “It really puts an uneven balance on the race.”

That’s not the half of it.

The redistricting process, controlled as it is by deeply entrenched incumbents, is rigged to shore up the re-election chances of sitting lawmakers. The current re-election rate is well north of 90 percent.

And thanks to porous campaign finance laws that allow lawmakers to raise unlimited sums of money (only direct corporate and union contributions are banned), it’s nearly impossible for a challenger to defeat a legislative incumbent.

The recent victory of state Sen. Scott Wagner, R-York, an especially well-funded challenger in a low turnout special election, is a rare exception to that rule.

He wants the court to bar House leaders from using funds to pay for the new outreach effort.

“The Ethics Act does not permit incumbent members of the General Assembly to spend [small amounts of] public monies in furtherance of activity which provides a clear, direct, palpable and pecuniary support to their prosecution of a re-election campaign,” Stilp's complaints states. “Such expenditure of public money is deemed a conflict of interest.”

Admittedly, Stilp has a dog in this hunt. The Democrat is again challenging Republican state Rep. Sue Helm in Dauphin County’s 104th House District. But his broader point is correct.

In its ruling, the commission allowed lawmakers to send out non-political legislative newsletters, birthday and congratulatory letters and notices of upcoming meetings and forums.

The panel also ruled that as long as the cost of such activities fell between $2 and $500, lawmakers would not run afoul of the conflict of interest exclusion in the state Ethics Act.

We can almost understand the allowance for notices about upcoming meetings and forums.

But birthday wishes and congratulatory notes exist for one purpose and one purpose only: To get sitting lawmakers re-elected. They don’t serve a single public policy good.. And to claim they do strains the limits of credulity to the breaking point.

If a challenger such as Bedford County’s Lang wants to send a potential voter a birthday card or a note congratulating them on some life event, he’ll have to dig into his own campaign coffers to do it.

And that’s the way it should be. Incumbent lawmakers trying to introduce themselves to new constituents, under the transparent guise of electioneering, should be expected to do the same.

Further, as The Tribune-Review's story notes, the Department of State spent $1.5 million on constitutionally required legal advertisements announcing the changes to the 203 state House and 50 Senate seats affected by redistricting.